Ask a Feminist is part of the Feminist Public Intellectuals Project. 

© 2019 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

Ask a Feminist: Byllye Avery Discusses the Past and Future of Reproductive Justice with Susan Reverby

Byllye Avery and Susan Reverby

[social_warfare]

The following conversation took place on July 25, 2019. An edited transcript is below.

Listen to the conversation and subscribe to the Ask a Feminist podcast.

.

Susan Reverby: Hi, this is Susan Reverby and I'm so happy to be talking to Byllye Avery today as part of Signs’ Ask a Feminist series. Byllye, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today.

Byllye Avery: My pleasure.

SR: We are here to try to get some historical perspective on the abortion struggles of the last half century and into the future. In the pre-Roe v. Wade era, historian Leslie Reagan argues, abortion was more of a secret than housed in silence. As a longtime feminist health activist, can you tell me when you first became aware of abortion as a concern?

BA: Well, it was really somewhere in the seventies, actually, that I became aware of it as a concern because before that I knew nothing much about abortion. Certainly no one talked about it. And when I was in college in the fifties, you know, we never heard that word. We did know that sometimes when we secure pills or try to take a douche or whatever to make sure they didn't get pregnant or stay pregnant, but that was as much as I knew.

SR: So was it talked about in the dorms at all, do you remember? You’re in Talladega, right, in Alabama?

BA: I went to Talladega College in Alabama. No, certainly no talk. If there was any talk, you know it would be negative talk, like, “Oh, she threw away a baby.” That was the term that people used. Never used “abortion”—that never was a word, never was something that we knew very much about. But no one knew very much about it.

SR: Well, you know, it's interesting, I go to college maybe seven or eight years after you and I'm at Cornell in Upstate New York at the same time and I don't remember any talk about it either. I think we knew there were some doctors in the area, but I don't remember ever talking about it.  I just remember being terrified that I could get pregnant.

BA: Yes, we all were. We lived with that fear because we also didn't have any information and certainly no birth control. I mean, nothing that you could use. I think the only thing that was used during that time were condoms, certainly among people I knew. It just was a different time, a different era.

[click_to_tweet tweet="'We lived with ... fear because we also didn't have any information and certainly no birth control.' —Byllye Avery" quote="We lived with ... fear because we also didn't have any information and certainly no birth control." theme="style2"]

SR: So, I would think by the early sixties, mid-sixties, the Pill was available.

BA: Yes.

SR: So by the time I was in my last year in college, we all were on the Pill, but you're talking about ten years earlier than that, right?

BA: Oh, yeah, and I can remember my mother was a little bit disappointed when she found out I was using a tampon. Because to use tampons sort of implied that you were sexually active. And, of course, I was, but you know… [laughs]

SR: It wasn’t from the tampon!

BA: It wasn’t from the tampon. But just to let you know how much knowledge we did not have. It was unbelievable.

But then later on, I finished college in 1959, and in 1969, I went back to graduate school. And that was in the heat of the beginning of the second wave of feminism that instantly started in Gainesville, Florida, where I was. I moved from Jacksonville to Gainesville, and that, I would say, if I had to look at one geographical relocation in my life that had the greatest impact, it was that move, seventy miles away.

SR: Right. Because there was a famous paper that came out of the Gainesville women's movement that I remember we read in New York.

BA: Oh really?

SR: Oh, yeah. I still remember. I don't remember what it was called, but we read it in New York. So we read it around the same time, ‘69.

BA: Redstockings?

SR: No, it wasn't the Redstockings. It was something from women from Gainesville. It was a paper from Gainesville. I have to go back and look.

BA: So there you are and you’re going back to graduate school and what are you doing?

BA: I finished graduate school and I started working at Shands Teaching Hospital in the psychiatric unit for kids, kids who were autistic. It was the beginnings of looking at autism, and it was headed by Paul Adams, who was a Quaker, who was just an incredible man with a vision of the world and how we all should live our lives. He hated the present, he lived in the future, so he dragged us along with him and we went. We were asked to do a didactic presentation, me along with Judy Levy, about what was happening with women's health, what was happening with women's reproductive health, etc.—not so much women’s heath but reproductive health. And we did this presentation about how important it was to have access to abortion, that we needed to have it.

SR: So at this point, we're talking about the early seventies, so it's before Roe v. Wade but it's after the law has changed in New York, California, and Hawaii, right? So now there's a place to go that's at least legal, but that's a very far distance for women from Gainesville, to go to New York.

BA: We did send several women there, several white women, who had the resources and they just needed the information. But then when a young black woman came to us, we tried to give her the information, and she had no resources, and she actually died from a self-induced abortion. That really brought it home and made us understand the importance of access. It doesn't matter what you have; if I can't get it, as far as I'm concerned, you don't have it.

[click_to_tweet tweet="Byllye Avery on the importance of access: 'It doesn't matter what {rights} you have; if {you} can't get it, as far as I'm concerned, you don't have it.'" quote="It doesn't matter what {rights} you have; if {you} can't get it, as far as I'm concerned, you don't have it." theme="style2"]

SR: I worked in one of the first clinics in New York right after the law changed that fall and I answered the phone. So I remember women calling up and saying, “Are they really doctors? Is this really safe?” Because it was so new. And then people being completely terrified to come to New York, as you can well imagine—not only the cost but how do they get there, how do they get there from the airport or the bus, where are they going to stay, who's going to take care of them? I mean it was a very scary time even though the law had changed.

BA: And then having an abortion on top of all of that is a bit much. It was a lot. But women went through it.

SR: So what would happen mostly of the women that you knew in Gainesville? Were people basically still seeing illegal people or…. What was happening?

BA: I don't know about the ones seeing illegal people, but I know as soon as the law became the law of the land, we started taking women to Jacksonville, which was only seventy miles away. And we were literally taking them to Jacksonville, going to Jacksonville every weekend. You’d either be taking somebody to get an abortion or they're going back for their post-op. Something was happening every single weekend. We had that set up with different ones of us who would make that drive. And at that same time, Planned Parenthood in Gainesville wanted to set up an abortion clinic and so they appealed to the Alachua County Medical Society, who turned them down, saying the need was not there. But we knew that the need was there. So three of us—me, Judy Levy, and Margaret Parrish—we would gather in Judy Levy’s kitchen, around her kitchen table, and dream about having a center that not only did abortions but did birth and looked at women's health in the totality of who we are and recognized that at different times in our lives, we make different decisions.

[click_to_tweet tweet="Byllye Avery dreamed 'about having a center that not only did abortions but did birth and looked at women's health in the totality of who we are and recognized that at different times in our lives, we make different decisions.' " quote="'{We} dreamed about having a center that not only did abortions but did birth and looked at women's health in the totality of who we are and recognized that at different times in our lives, we make different decisions." theme="style2"]

SR: You know, what's so interesting about that, and I think gets lost in the history, is how much abortion wasn't just the focus, that we always try to think about it in the context of women's reproductive needs. I mean, the word “reproductive rights” took a little bit longer to come into use, but we certainly were all thinking about it in a spectrum of need, don’t you think?

BA: Absolutely, yes we were. And there was so much we had to unlearn: we are healthy when we’re pregnant, and we're not sick, and women who came to have abortions were not sick. So it was just a lot that we had to deal with.

SR: Did you get people in who are still really fearful about what was going to happen to them?

BA: Not when we opened the clinic. The way we open the center was interesting and I say it here because people need to understand the strategies that you have to develop to do something to get around whatever. Knowing that the Alachua County Medical Society turned down Planned Parenthood, we just decided open up the clinic and not ask for permission. So we were right across the street from Alachua General Hospital, who wouldn't see a patient we had but we used that in our information because it helped women feel a little bit safe, but we did have a relationship with Shands Teaching Hospital, which was like seven minutes away. So it wasn't that we were being irresponsible by including them. But when we opened it up, the doctors couldn't say anything because we said, “Oh, we didn’t know, we had no idea.”

SR: So what kind of care were you providing?

BA: We were providing first-trimester abortions and well-woman GYN care. And what was striking to me at that time is that even though black women were like 20 percent of the population in Gainesville, we were 50 percent of the abortions, that women would not come in by themselves, that they were coming in with their partners, their husbands. Nobody was fearful. Nobody was feeling ashamed. Just none of that really existed. Well, first thing we did was we created an incredible center where they could come that felt like home, you know, denim furniture was the style. We had denim couches and we had […]  shag carpet on the floor. In the procedure rooms, we had posters on the ceiling. We had flowers and plants. This is a time where doctor's offices were very sterile-looking places with tile floors and nothing, so we kind of created this beautiful space. And then we were beautiful in it with the women who came—and the men.

SR: Did you have a physician doing the abortions?

BA: Absolutely, we always had physicians. All of the abortions were done by physicians. They were really residents, third-year residents at the University of Florida going to school in Jacksonville.

SR: You know, what's interesting at the same time in like California, Carol Downer and people around her in Los Angeles are starting to teach themselves how to do it. And they started to do it themselves and teaching other women how to do it. Were you aware of some of those underground groups?

BA: Oh the menstrual extraction, we knew how all of that was done.

SR: So one of the things that starts to happen is both Carol Downer and a woman named Lorraine Rothman invent the Del-Em, that was used to extract the menstrual period and you could do it every month. And the idea in the beginning was to do it collectively but then women were doing it themselves and I think they felt that people couldn't afford the abortions. I don't know what you were charging in Gainesville.

BA: I think we were charging $125.

SR: It was $200 in New York. But, you know, at that point I was making $100 a week. So $200 would have been half your salary for the whole month. So it still was a lot of money. Did you guys at all think about doing it illegally? Having other people do it?

BA: No, we never thought about that, and we were not in the [Federation of Feminist Women's Health Centers]. We were not a part of the federation. There was the federation and then there were these independent centers.

SR: Right. So some of the other groups are really trying to learn the procedure themselves and do it without physician help and then there were real debates, I remember, about how dangerous this could be. Real division I think in the women's health movement, don’t you think?

BA: There was real division.

SR: I mean, I remember being on the other side, completely terrified that someone would die in the name of feminism. That we would kill somebody because we didn't know what we were doing.

BA: Right. No, we didn't do that and we always had very good medical directors who helped us. I remember Max Souter from Jacksonville was our first medical director. And it was a positive experience for the women who came, which is what people don't quite understand—how burdensome it can be when you are pregnant and you don't want to be. It's not a good time. It's not the right time. It's the worst time—for whatever reason that you have, it weighs on you. So women really had a big sigh of relief that it was over.

[click_to_tweet tweet="'People don't quite understand how burdensome it can be when you are pregnant and you don't want to be. It's not a good time. It's not the right time. It's the worst time—for whatever reason that you have, it weighs on you.' —Byllye Avery " quote="People don't quite understand how burdensome it can be when you are pregnant and you don't want to be. It's not a good time. It's not the right time. It's the worst time—for whatever reason that you have, it weighs on you." theme="style2"]

SR: Right, but this is also before you're getting anybody's getting picketed, right? They didn't have to go through a gauntlet.

BA: No. No, we didn’t have any of that. I think once we had a little bit of picketing and in a month one of the women who was on the lines was coming in getting an abortion, and we reminded her of that. But nothing like what you see now.

SR: And were you aware of the people who ran Jane in Chicago?

BA: We knew about the Jane Collective.

SR: So do you want to explain to our audience what Jane was?

Read Kelly Suzanne O’Donnell's Signs article "Reproducing Jane: Abortion Stories and Women’s Political Histories."

BA: The Jane Collective was a group of women in Chicago who made a decision to form an abortion referral service. And so you would call a certain number and ask to speak to Jane, and that was the way you got through to find out where in the country you could go and get an abortion. I've told that story to many young women now and said you need to think about, “what are you going to do if abortion becomes illegal?” I told them about another thing that I heard from talking with my friend Leslie, who said to me (she's white), “Me and all of my girlfriends had a thousand dollars that we kept. And the thousand dollars were if you needed to go have an abortion. And if you didn't have your thousand saved up within our group, we pooled our money to give you your thousand so that you could go and do that.” So that was kind of unheard of, you know.

SR: Feminist insurance policy.

BA: Yeah, that’s was exactly what it was.

SR: This is the historian in me but it would be really interesting to know how many of these existed. So if you're listening and you can talk to your mothers or grandmothers, ask them about this because it’s really interesting ….

BA: And we always heard about women going to Mexico and getting abortions and then people talking about what horrible experiences they had, etc. I’m not sure about that at all. I think that was just scare tactics because—abortions are very readily available in Mexico and if they had been killing women back then, it wouldn’t be.

SR: People went to Puerto Rico too, is what I remember, as well, and to Sweden, but that would have been impossible for most of us. Nobody had that kind of money.

I mean we know from Leslie Reagan's work that it was, as I said, a secret. So people knew like where the doctor was that was safe. Where you could go, as well. And then there were these attempts to try to learn how to do it.

BA: And then there was the DNC that women had. The doctors who were sympathetic would do a DNC. The doctors who were punitive would do a DNC but you had to have your tubes tied. That meant that you could have no more children. [But just] because I didn't want this one, didn't mean that I didn't want to ever have any.

SR: So, a “DNC” is a “dilation and curettage.” It was opening up the cervix and then cleaning out the material and ventromedial lining of the uterus.

So how do you think since the time that you and I were both involved in this in the seventies, what do you think have been the biggest changes since then?

[click_to_tweet tweet="'Things like birth control did very little to change a lot of the systems for a lot of poor women. The Pill did nothing much for the power imbalance that they have with men.' —Byllye Avery in Signs' Ask a Feminist" quote="Things like birth control did very little to change a lot of the systems for a lot of poor women. The Pill did nothing much for the power imbalance that they have with men." theme="style2"]

BA: Well, I think the biggest change came with the onset of the Pill because that then gave women, you know…. Once we got it all straightened out and got the dosages all straightened out and figured out who they were experimenting on and why they were doing it and called them out on that and made the FDA [Food and Drug Administration] become more actively involved. It didn't just happen, it happened because we made it happen. Then women felt a lot more liberated. I think that things like birth control did very little to change a lot of the systems for a lot of poor women. I mean the Pill did nothing much for the power imbalance that they have with men. I’m speaking really of the women who were on Medicaid, who needed abortions when Medicaid was funded, and it was so easy to take it away from that population.

SR: Right, we get the Hyde Amendment very early like ‘74 or ‘75.

BA: Very early. And even before the Hyde Amendment when we had Medicaid abortions, it would take forever for them to pay. Here we are running this thing on a shoestring where every dollar counts, and the government will take six months or so to pay you. I mean it was awful. So, you had to, you know, not only be fundraisers and money managers over this but you had to do both sides. But we still see, even with the current ACA [Affordable Care Act], the poor women get thrown under the bus repeatedly. So, birth control didn't change that.

SR: Did you see much change when the two drugs came in that make it possible to do a medical rather than a surgical abortion? Do you think that changed much?

BA: Well I think is should but you know, I've not been in that scene much since then but I do remember in the late seventies or the early eighties having a conversation with folks from NARAL—I said that one day surgical abortion won't be necessary. I had just read some book somewhere that spoke to it. And I said, what about the idea of a non-surgical abortion, a medical abortion? And boy did they blast me out of the room: “As women, we always need to have access to surgical abortions.” And nobody would entertain the idea at that time, but then later it grew. I've heard about the use of the non[surgical] abortion more in countries like Brazil. In Brazil the women were using it a lot, much more than I heard about here because they still had access.

SR: Right because that's obviously much easier to get. You have to worry about where you buy it and whether you will get something really good that's not a sugar pill but it would make a big difference. It would be interesting if Roe gets overturned—God forbid—but if that happens whether the pills will become more widely available.

BA: I think they’ll get them from Canada or they’ll get them from somewhere. They’ll figure out.

SR: So we'll have the funds that we all collected will be to buy by the drugs instead of go for the abortion. And then of course, there's always the problem of women’s second trimester and what's going to happen. Do you think that with the advances in some of the discussion about fetal development that feminists over the years have taken a much different sense about how to deal with the growth of the fetus itself?

BA: Well that kind of brings up two issues for me: That somehow we let the emphasis shift from the woman to the fetus. The fetus became as if it's something that can exist by itself. It has potential life, but it's not viable, and so somehow we let that that become the center of it.

SR: We don't know what will happen if the law gets overturned. I don't know whether some states will continue to be able to do it and we'll see what we saw between ‘70 and ‘73.

BA: We’ll have a patchwork.

SR: We’ll have a patchwork and we’re going to have to start raising funds to get people, or to get them to other countries and we're going to have to do more of that. I mean, I know one of the things we did in New York in the Women's Health and Abortion Project in the seventies, where the women who came who needed second-trimester abortions, those had to be in the hospital. So we loaned out our addresses to people who needed to use a New York City public hospital, so we gave people fake addresses so that they could look like they were New York City residents. There was a lot less identification then, and maybe we even gave people are driver's licenses to take with them. I don't remember now, but we did stuff like that.

BA: But those kinds of strategies are going to have to be worked out again. I was just speaking to a group of African American women in Michigan and Wisconsin and I said you all can keep your heads in the sand if you want. You really have got to find out about Plan B, Plan C…

SR: D, E, and F, right?

BA: You have got to put things in place. You no longer have the luxury of just sitting back and judging. That is just not going to happen.

SR: Not for our daughters and our granddaughters it’s not.

[click_to_tweet tweet="Byllye Avery on women who have never faced life without access to abortion: 'They know nothing about these kind of difficulties.... Somehow we didn't get those stories passed down. They stayed locked up in our mothers’ and our generations’ minds.'" quote="'They know nothing about these kind of difficulties.... Somehow we didn't get those stories passed down. They stayed locked up in our mothers’ and our generations’ minds.'" theme="style2"]

BA: It's not. I also think younger women, because they've never lived without access to abortion—they know nothing. They know nothing about these kind of difficulties that we talk about, that we think about. Somehow we didn't get those stories passed down. They stayed locked up in our mothers’ and our generations’ minds. So I’m glad you're doing this so that people can hear that it was a hard struggle. And people think that they can just make the decisions and go on with their lives and you don't know that there's a big foot on your neck.

SR: Right. The other part of it. I used to tell my students all the time. I said one of the, I thought, mistakes we made in the women's movement was instead of using the hanger, as the symbol, I said what we really should have had was the shotgun because in my high school in Upstate New York in the fifties and sixties, people got married.

BA: A shotgun wedding, right. Absolutely!

SR: I say to my students all the time, “You know that guy you dated for a nanosecond in high school, now imagine having to marry him,” and all my students turn green. So I think what we don’t talk about is the forced marriages. That’s what happened where I was growing up in the late fifties and early sixties. People who got married right out of high school, especially in working-class communities where that would be normative, but to guys they might not otherwise have ever married. What are the implications of that? For their lives, for divorce, for their children that hadn't been planned, all of that. So I do think that's one of the things we have to talk about.

BA: That’s a very good point because women don't realize that. Also, the doctors who say “I'll give you an abortion, but you have to have your tubes tied.” Then the women in Mississippi who they did “appendectomies” on—the “Mississippi appendectomy,” which was a hysterectomy!

SR: So what happened in New York, I was part of a group in the Urban Coalition, and Helen Rodriguez was the head of our group and was a pediatric neonatologist in New York. We were keeping track of the abortions in New York City public hospitals, and what we discovered was that there were often a lot of tubal ligations and hysterectomies at the same time as the abortion, and only in the hospitals that were in black and Puerto Rican communities. That was really the beginning of understanding what becomes the reproductive rights movement. We began to really understand that reproductive rights was about both the right to have an abortion but also the right to have children.

BA: And not be sterilized. That whole sterilization abuse.

SR: That's really where it began. It really began in our tracking those numbers in New York City with Helen, and then other people went on to build a reproductive rights movement. Can you also say something a little bit about the use of the term “reproductive justice” vs. “reproductive rights”?

BA: Yes. I think a lot of this change in terminology came out of a lot of the work that we sat around and did as black women when realizing that a right didn't mean a thing if you had no way to exercise it, and that we had a lot of black women whose babies were dying, who wanted their babies. And infant mortality—we couldn't get any attention around black infant mortality, not even from the feminist groups that were working on “reproductive rights.” And so “justice,” Loretta Ross coined this term like ten or fifteen years ago now, that really encompasses all of the intersectionalities and all of the things that go into making a procedure available, increasing access. “Justice” means access that I need—I have a right to have a healthy baby, I have a right to not die during my pregnancy because of something somebody didn't do or pay attention to or made a decision in their unconscious racist mind about who I am and what I deserve. So “justice” really encompasses all of it. It doesn't slice it down to rights, and I must say much to [the credit of] our movement, women grasped that concept and quickly switched to “reproductive justice.”

[click_to_tweet tweet="“'Justice' means access—I have a right to have a healthy baby, I have a right to not die during my pregnancy because ... somebody ... made a decision in their unconscious racist mind about who I am and what I deserve.' Byllye Avery on 'reproductive justice'" quote="“'Justice' means access—I have a right to have a healthy baby, I have a right to not die during my pregnancy because ... somebody ... made a decision in their unconscious racist mind about who I am and what I deserve.'" theme="style2"]

Read the Signs Short Takes on Katha Pollitt's Pro, featuring a commentary from Loretta Ross:

Katha Pollitt’s Pro

SR: Right? So you can see the terminology shift from “abortion access,” “pro-choice” to “reproductive rights” by the mid-seventies to the idea of “reproductive justice.” So it raises this interesting question, if we lose Roe at the Supreme Court level, what will reproductive justice look like?

BA: Hmm. That, I have no idea. We wait to see what that chapter brings. But I must say this: women are very creative and we are still real smart and we’ve always been so much smarter than the men, and even though they think they’re winning now with all their shenanigans, in the end the women will win. We're going to lose some women along the way but we never had those women in the first place, and we're fighting for their lives too, you know. And in a nanosecond, they can switch over to understand it.

But I think, what would happen if we say to men, “all of those sperm that you produce, they represent a potential life, too”? What are we going to do about that? Can we put some laws on that? We need to turn this over so that they stop coming up with these foolish solutions, crazy ideas. That women can shut down their bodies if they are getting raped? Shut down what?

[click_to_tweet tweet="'Women are very creative and we are still real smart and we’ve always been so much smarter than the men... In the end the women will win.' —Byllye Avery on the future of reproductive justice" quote="Women are very creative and we are still real smart and we’ve always been so much smarter than the men... In the end the women will win." theme="style2"]

SR: The ignorance…. I always feel like the failures of middle school and high school biology classes is just stunning, what people don't know. I mean when we think about the beginnings of the women's health movement a lot of it was called “know your body” classes. We had to help women understand. I had a friend who, on her one of her exams in her history of medicine course, used to say to the students, “How many orifices do women have at the bottom of their bodies?” This was at Boston University in the seventies, and people didn't know. They had no idea. I mean, I think people thought the pee came out of their vaginas. People’s ignorance about their own bodies and the way the ignorance was created was it seems to me so much a part of what we were…  This is before you could go Google it. Now at least you can do that. But all those books, they were behind lock and key in the library, you couldn’t get that knowledge.

BA: And then they didn’t tell you anything anyway. And you had teachers who were uncomfortable with the material themselves because unlike the people in the Netherlands, who taught and passed down information through their families, so you get it with feelings, you get it with love. And you don't have to worry about legally what you can say and what you can't say, it's just passed from generation to generation. So that's what we're trying to get folks to do. Mothers, have these conversations with your daughters and your sons. And let them know you don't know, that you might be messing up on this but we're trying, and we’re going do this and I'm going to be as honest as I can. And some of us might need a moment to go away and prepare, to come back to see how I can answer this question. I think that's the solution now because the school boards are all, “You can't say this, you can't say that.” Somebody gets their feelings hurt, now with all political correctness is going on, you talk about rape or incest and somebody feels uncomfortable and they have a teacher fired because you brought up something made them feel uncomfortable. So, it's just ridiculous, a lot of what’s going on.

SR: I think it raises this interesting question going forward about how are we going to help people in families take care of this because this won't happen publicly. What kind of underground work are we going to have to do to make the pills available for medical abortions. People are always going to need second-trimester abortions just because people don't know that they're pregnant, sometimes they just wait too long, people are afraid to acknowledge what's happening in their own body or don’t know. And I think we're going to have to do the kind of organizing again we all know how to do that. And women and men will figure it out.

[click_to_tweet tweet="'Women’s groups have got to start getting together, ... start doing your organizing.... Every city, every town has got to have it. Every place. You just have to do it.' —Byllye Avery on the future of reproductive justice" quote="Women’s groups have got to start getting together, ... start doing your organizing.... Every city, every town has got to have it. Every place. You just have to do it." theme="style2"]

BA: Women’s groups have got to start getting together. Get yourselves together, start doing your organizing. We have to have them all over the country, in every city, every town has got to have it. Every place. You just have to do it.

SR: Well, thank you, this was just wonderful. I really appreciate your time.

BA: You’re welcome. I loved talking to you.